Tonari no Seki-kun, or Master of Killing Time, is a series of short sketches based around a simple joke – an ingenious student devises ridiculous ways of entertaining himself in lessons while managing to avoid ever attracting the attention of the teacher. Five episodes in, it has managed to quite avoid becoming repetitive by making its protagonist unpredictable – it has become an absurd comedy that exaggerates what could be a simple premise not through a simple escalation of scale into parody, but through wrong-footing the viewer and engaging far more with the viewpoint character, Seki’s studious classmate Yokoi.

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